I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but there's a new update out.

If you've been following this game, you might have noticed that it's been having some crashing bugs. At first I thought it was a conflict between some anti-lag scripts and other stuff. So I fixed that. Then I thought it was the QTE magic system, which was funky even if it wasn't causing crashes.

I ultimately deleted the QTE magic system, even though I still think it was a clever idea in a ludonarrative kind of way. And I thought that was it!

But no. Turns out there was a real strange crashing problem that kicked up a bug in the RTP-standard code. I couldn't get it to reproduce consistently. I hadn't heard it was a problem for players. And I chalked it up to my potato compy, figured it was memory issue, and called it a day. But a youtuber was playing my game (links to be posted soon in the bar above) and it got embarrassing how many crashes there were. And then another player made a comment here about lack of polish and crashes - that stung. It seems that if there were more than 3 battles that happened on a large map, there'd be that same screwy RTP-script-related crash. Was it memory? Battle symphony? Yanfly Battle Engine? It was certainly battle-related... right?

Turns out it was fyxinput and loadso. What are those, you may ask? Heck if I know, but they are scripts that monkey around with button input. They were needed for the QTE system and also the lockpicking minigame. Even though the QTE system was gone, I left them in because I kinda liked the lockpicking game. I worked hard on it (although the original eventing was done by someone else). It was relatively unique. I thought it was one of the few aspects of the game that set mine apart from others.

You take out fyxinput and loadso, however, and there are suddenly 100% fewer crashes. Big maps. Small maps. Items. No items. Skills. No skills. It all works as it should. I'm apprehensive to celebrate too much, but I think this is it.

I went through and changed the treasure chests to the standard "find a chest, open it, profit" model. I would like to claim that I found all the chests I sprinkled in the game... But if I didn't, please let me know. Regardless, since the lockpicking minigame wouldn't start if you didn't have lockpicks, and I've taken lockpicks out of the game, any chest I missed will give you a message of, "You need a lockpick to open this." Which is frustrating to a player - but it sure as shit isn't a crash.

An added benefit of cutting those two scripts is that the game is now 100% joypad compatible! That's fun, right?

So, to all of you who struggled through the game and all its crashes, I salute you. You are true Heroes of the Web and Internet Budz.

To all of you who may be stumbling across this game months/years later and am going through these blog posts: Welcome! I hope the game you play is stable. Drop a note here if you have an issue.